Mary Lee the shark surprises researchers

The great white shark named Mary Lee has moved east from Long Island, NY, to the edge of the continental shelf, south and southeast of Nantucket, state environmental analyst and shark expert Greg Skomal said Friday.

The great white shark named Mary Lee has moved east from Long Island, N.Y., to the edge of the continental shelf, south and southeast of Nantucket, state environmental analyst and shark expert Greg Skomal said Friday.

The shark is one of the first two ever tagged in the North Atlantic, and the data produced from satellite readings from Mary Lee, in particular, are giving scientists information never seen before.

The 3,500-pound shark was expected to stay the entire winter in waters off the southeastern United States or in southern latitudes, Skomal said. But she began to move north last week.

“She broke the mold,” Skomal said. “Everything that Mary Lee does is kind of new to us.”

Mary Lee and Genie, another great white, were tagged in September off Cape Cod by OCEARCH, a nonprofit organization that studies great white sharks and other large marine species.

Mary Lee is named after the mother of OCEARCH founder, Chris Fischer.

Initially, both sharks headed south as expected, and Mary Lee made it as far as the waters off Jacksonville, Fla., before turning north again. Genie's latest position was off Georgia on Jan. 19, according to the OCEARCH website, which has a tracking map.

Genie surfaces less than Mary Lee, so she is not as easy to track.

Skomal is monitoring the sharks' travels from raw data produced moment by moment from the satellite.